With the increased availability of high bandwidth network connections in both enterprise settings and home settings, there has been an increased demand for real-time communication services such as internet telephony, video conferencing and instant messaging. In response to this increased demand, real-time communication service providers have proliferated. Many of these providers are companies unto themselves. Very often, however, real-time communication services for an enterprise (i.e. corporation or other organization) are provided internally on the enterprise's internal network. Regardless of who actually provides real-time services to computer users, configuring client computers for carrying out real-time communication functions is often a nightmare. In the enterprise setting, a network administrator has to go around to each client computer on the network to set it up. In the home setting, a user is usually forced to configure his or her own computer for real-time communication. These difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that, very often, the topology of the real-time communication service provider's network changes in such a way as to render invalid a user's previous configuration settings.